What I find personally funniest about the whole real name argument is: I have the most common last name in the Western world, and one of the most common first names. The combination together means you can never hope to find me on any search engine.

However, if you let me authenticate as lj:cow (or some form of the Cow/criacow identity) you've got an alias with 15 years of history that's been used on USENET, LJ, blogs, etc.--even all the way back to FIDONET.

Letting me authenticate as a pseudonym gets you a far more stable and reliable identity than requiring my government-approved name.

> "The idea that real names are somehow more trustworthy or polite flies in the face of my experience."

I don't see it that way. Those teenagers? They *were* being untrustworthy. It's just that what they were combating was the trust of others that as teenagers, *they were unworthy, unreliable and unproductive*.

I don't begrudge them the opportunity to hide from the preconceptions of the adults in question, nor do I support those preconceptions, but let's call an African-American an African-American* here: they were engaging in subterfuge.

That the subterfuge was towards a cause that most of us, observing the entire episode from outside, would call "good" does not make it *not* be subterfuge.

Like "hacking" or "lock-picking", subterfuge is a *tool*, neither good nor bad. What makes it good or bad is the *ends* to which it is put. The ends don't justify the means, they *define* it.

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* Anyone who thinks that was racism has spent a whole lot of time paying no attention to hacker humor.

Ironically in context, the guy with this nym has a history of spraying Very Privileged Person juice all over discussions of sexism in computing (e.g. google "site:lwn.net baylink"). I'm not at all surprised that he thinks a bit of just-kidding racism trolling is a great way to spice up his comments here.